Author's Death Imitates His Art Of Mystery

January 17, 1997|By Mary Schmich.

After I wrote a story on the death of Guy Izzi, the Chicago crime novelist who was found hanging from the window of his Michigan Avenue office on a cold morning last December, I heard from several people who were convinced that he didn't commit suicide. They supported their conviction in a variety of ways.

He was too manly. He was too kind. He loved his family. He loved to write. He couldn't have done it. He wouldn't have done it. He wasn't, in sum, "that kind of guy."

But what kind of guy? What kind of man--or woman--does any of us know for sure wouldn't commit suicide?

Suicide remains one of the most mysterious of human acts, one that for centuries has confounded philosophers, doctors and lawyers, as well as the loved ones of those who choreograph their own way out. Few of us comprehend the dark junction of psyche and circumstance at which certain people conclude that the rest of the trip simply isn't worth the price.

This week the Cook County medical examiner's office, noting that Izzi was seeing a psychiatrist and taking anti-depressants, concluded that Izzi, in fact, did end his own life. His end mimicked a scene from a novel he had been writing, but in the fiction, the hero, a writer much like Izzi, hoists himself back up the rope and shoots the assailants who tried to hang him.

If the medical examiner is right, many people who thought they understood Izzi apparently didn't understand, or simply couldn't see, the psychic niche that held his thoughts of the unthinkable. People who commit suicide are often experts at such camouflage.

One of the suicide skeptics I heard from was, as she described herself, a "67-year-old Italian wife, mom and noni" who wrote Izzi his first fan letter. She began corresponding with him shortly after his first novel was published in 1987, and she sent me a couple of his responses--long, typed letters brimming with gratitude and dreams.

"When I was a boy my father was in prison and my mother drank, and I turned to books for escape," he wrote in one. "They took me away and transported me to a place that was safe and without pain. The first book I read that did this for me was `The Deep Blue Goodbye,' by John D. MacDonald. I was 10 years old. I will never forget that book or that writer because without his somehow being able to take me into another world I fear that I might have gone a far different route."

In a later letter, shortly before another book was published, Izzi wrote, "This book is supposed to put me over the top in terms of sales. It won't make me a success, I considered myself successful when I made my first sale, but it very well could put me over the top in terms of long-term financial security for my family. Respect, too, that's important to me. And you don't get that in New York without sales."

But Izzi's break never came. Nor did financial security. The respect he craved was snatched away when his 1992 book, "Tribal Secrets," bombed at a book convention and the publisher yanked the ad campaign.

The woman had sent me these letters to support her conviction that Izzi didn't kill himself. They reinforced my suspicion that he did. We had looked at the same information and each had seen a different man.

Most of us think we have an instinct for the kind of person who commits suicide. Chances are, our instincts are wrong.

True, patterns can be discerned. About 20 percent of people who kill themselves have problems with alcohol. Anywhere from a third to two-thirds suffer from depression or manic-depression. Suicide runs in families.

Still, suicide is extremely hard to predict. In a recent issue devoted to the topic, the Harvard Mental Health Letter noted, "There is no test both sensitive enough to identify most people who will go on to kill themselves and so accurate that it will not falsely predict suicide for many others."

Many people, some who knew Izzi and some who didn't, remain unconvinced by the medical examiner's report. They maintain their beliefs about his life and about the nature of suicide. For them, his death will remain a mystery.

But even the skeptics have to admit this: The mind of another person is the greatest mystery of all.